Google Analytics 4 - Whats New in 2022

all right let's go ahead and get started so thanks everyone for joining welcome to our webinar for today on what's new in google analytics 4 in 2022 uh our agenda for today is we're gonna do a webinar around all of the kind of recent updates that google's done uh in 2022 so really probably in the last three to six months i'm going to cover all the core features and updates

and then at the end of our webinar uh i'll stay on as long as people have questions so as we go through the webinar we have some folks from adswerve that are here to answer your questions and then we'll have plenty of time to do live q a at the at the end as well but before we get started with any of that i also wanted to kind of go through some of the recent announcements obviously about the deprecation of universal what that means kind of why that's happening and then kind of get to our live uh demo

and then kind of get to our live uh demo and then kind of get to our live uh demo portion portion so before we do that just a quick a bit of information about me so for those who haven't met me my name is charles i've been working with oddswhere i think for over eight years now i'm deeply experienced in the google marketing platform especially on the analytics platform especially on the analytics side side i've had the opportunity to both train and implement google analytics on hundreds of enterprise clients including tesla gopro zoomies and many including tesla gopro zoomies and many others others and i'm deeply experienced in kind of

and i'm deeply experienced in kind of the 360 and enterprise version and for the past probably two years uh ever since app plus web which is now ga4 was an alpha and beta i've been testing it helping our clients kind of adapt it and also working with google to improve the product along the way so excited to be here to share all my so excited to be here to share all my knowledge knowledge behind the scenes we also have a few ad servers as i mentioned who are available to answer chat or questions as we go to answer chat or questions as we go through through

through again i'm gonna do a live q a at the end but feel free to ask questions at any time during our webinar in the chat feature and our team or i will try and assist you either during or after and then uh just another fun fact besides doing analytics which probably takes up uh 50 percent of my time the other 50 percent of my time i spend playing hockey i recently started a new team called dumpster fire and you can definitely tell from the statistics from the season that our team has a literal dumpster fire

dumpster fire in every way but i'm really proud of these jerseys we were voted the best jerseys in the league so i uh breathe and live analytics and hockey that's that's what i do so for today as promised our agenda what i'd like to do is do a quick refresh on ga4 versus universal so before we get into our live demo i thought it would be important to talk about the recent announcements as well as talk about some of the key differentiators between ga4 and universal

and universal after i do that i'm going to take you through all of the new features and updates and i've organized them into three key areas we're going to cover the integrations and there's some really exciting improvements that i feel like google's made especially for products like google optimize and even google ads which i'll cover uh in addition we're gonna go through some of the core feature updates those are mainly gonna probably be around attribution uh predictions as well as new modeling features for both privacy

new modeling features for both privacy and conversions and then as an outro i'll also introduce you all to some new features that are only available in the enterprise version just to kind of show you what those are and why those are important so we'll talk about roll-ups and subs but for those of you who are new to ga4 it's important to know that google analytics 4 is a brand new version of google analytics it's completely different than the universal or the version that all of us have been using for the last 15 years

for the last 15 years it has a different data model has a different ui and pretty much everything about it is different the only thing that's really similar about it is when you log into the platform like as we're looking at ga4 at first the theme and maybe some of the colors and even a few of the reports feel similar but as soon as you take a close look into anything in ga4 it's gonna start to immediately become clear it's a drastically different experience and product than the previous experience and product than the previous version version

version and the reason google's doing this is because a fun fact is the original tracking code the urchin.js version of google analytics you can still implement the javascript code from 15 years ago and it still works today which is kind of crazy and the hard part about that is there's many things today in google analytics as much as we all love the tool that don't much as we all love the tool that don't necessarily necessarily work in kind of the the model and the

way our users interact with us today so as an example conversions in google analytics conversions are all session based if someone watches for videos that conversion can only count once per session you don't have user-based goals and you can't have goals that kind of and you can't have goals that kind of are are count so it counts every time a user does an action additionally goals are very rigid you only ever had 20 of them you can't really do things like seasonal or campaign-based goals

there's other things that have never made sense about google analytics like if you ever tried to use a page the dimension your page with a metric like sessions the schema and the way that data models the schema and the way that data models worked worked doesn't allow that kind of scoping to work it actually will actually give you incorrect data if you mixed a session scoped metric with a page scoped dimension so there's all of these oddities all these things a lot of power users have wanted out of google

analytics and kind of the legacy of the back end of google analytics has really i think prevented a lot of that from kind of coming and then in addition all of you are probably well aware of all the privacy challenges so long story short google analytics 4 is built to kind of have a new data model that's event driven which is similar to many other platforms that other marketing systems work and behind that is tons of enhancements and new features and hopefully uh in 12 months from now

as we get closer to the date of deprecation so if you haven't heard about this in the free version of google analytics as of july of next year you can no longer send additional data to the old version of google analytics so the processing will stop you'll still be able to access the data inside the reports for a period after july but effectively as of july you'll no longer be able to send new data so the reason ga4 is such a hot topic right

now is because it's very important right now to implement it ideally as quickly as possible to start building historical data so that come july of next year you can do your year-over-year analysis take advantage of all the updates and features that google's continuing to work on and be well positioned to transition from universal to ga4 when the time comes so with that what i thought i'd do real quick before we go into our new feature quick before we go into our new feature demo demo

demo is i'll just do a quick refresh of three key features that i think differentiate ga4 from universal that you should be most excited about so the first feature that i love about ga4 is that google's completely rebuilt the concept of time or engagement so for any of you that have used universal analytics for a long time you've probably realized that unfortunately google analytics doesn't do a good job of measuring time

of measuring time like at all so it has time metrics it can measure time per page it can measure time per session and you can even get it to do time per and you can even get it to do time per user user but what it's incapable of really doing is measuring time per action so as an example when did someone start reading a blog post and then start watching a video or if you're e-commerce when did they start their checkout and when did they complete their checkout

or if you're b2b when do they start filling out a form and when do they finish filling out that form and then in addition time has always been measured between interactions in google analytics so if someone uh went to your home page and then went to lunch for 20 minutes and then came back and did something google analytics would record 20 minutes of time even though they weren't engaged with your website at all so ga4 has a new concept of engage time

so ga4 has a new concept of engage time where it only tracks the actual interactions or basically when your mouse is doing something on the website so as an example of this we have a completely rebuilt concept of time that's substantially more powerful than the universal version or the previous version of google analytics so an example of this is going to be inside the funnel report so funnels is kind of a bonus for anyone that's never used ga4 that means you've never been able to build a funnel in google analytics

build a funnel in google analytics because the previous version of google analytics and the free version really doesn't have funnels at all so in this enterprise version or sorry in this ga4 version what we can do is we can build funnels from the scratch and i'll show you a quick example of how time comes into play so we could come in we can build a funnel and then we can just define our steps and in these funnels you can do whatever steps you want so as an example we could steps you want so as an example we could say say i want to look for anyone that was on a

i want to look for anyone that was on a certain page of our website so maybe i'll say for adswurf i want to look at anyone that saw a blog post and then i want them to perform some sort of other action and i could have this be another event another page view pretty much anything i'm tracking about these users so in here i'm gonna use the page location dimensions so the first dimension will be that page location contains blog and then this will be any blog page they looked at and maybe i'm interested in how many of

and maybe i'm interested in how many of those got to maybe our about section or even better maybe i want to see how many people after viewing our blog looked at our contact page so i'll hit apply over here and you'll see on the right hand side it builds out our funnel and the cool part about this is i should have first named these so we'll say this is blog this is contact so this is easier for you to read but now i have my simple funnel and with

one step one check i can turn on this new feature of show elapsed time and google will instantly calculate the elapsed time so on average how much time did it take our users from reaching our blog and for those that did get to our contact page how much time did it take and you can see here on average it's three days so most users who get to our contact page don't immediately come from our blog they're obviously doing it in a later visit in the future so if you think about the power of this for e-commerce for just measuring time

for e-commerce for just measuring time in general this is a huge improvement that we have in ga4 over universal so another quick feature that is really important in ga4 is going to be those improvements to conversion tracking that i mentioned so conversions or goals in google analytics i think are very antiquated and we talked about that remember goals in the previous version of google analytics only increment once per session

and in addition they're really basic you can only have a goal that's based off of a page like a url or an event you can't make goals off of audiences or dimensions they're only based off of an event condition or a based off of an event condition or a page page so let me show you why that's important so first of all goals the concepts have been completely enhanced so the conversion tracking in ga4 is substantially more flexible so in

conversions instead of 20 you all get 30 conversions instead of 20 you all get 30 conversions conversions and more importantly goals in the previous version of google analytics were you couldn't delete them you couldn't reuse them the data was permanent and those 20 slots were always the 20 slots you got in ga4 they allow you to archive these so you can come in and say i don't want to use add to cart anymore and it actually frees up a new slot so you get a brand new conversion slot that you can use in the future

use in the future so why is that important well let's say your organization does seasonal based campaigns maybe back to school mother's campaigns maybe back to school mother's day day black friday or quarterly type of black friday or quarterly type of campaigns campaigns well if those campaigns have unique conversions that only apply to when those campaigns run you can now do seasonal campaigns get all your conversion tracking it'll archive the data when you're done and then it'll free up a new slot for you to use in the future so again for the first time you

can support many more conversion use cases by just having more flexible cases by just having more flexible components components the other part which is a huge change is the types of conversions you can create so a quick example i have an audience that i built and i built an audience and i said show me anyone that was on my i said show me anyone that was on my blog blog and within 10 minutes so here's that elapsed time within 10 minutes they got to my contact page so you can do that with audiences and

you can see i have these 59 users who completed both of these conditions but the interesting part for conversions is google has this new feature in ga4 called audience triggers and with audience triggers you can create an event when someone enters your audience so here i'm saying anytime someone's in my audience create this event and then what i can do in my in my events report is i can mark this audience event as a is i can mark this audience event as a conversion conversion so the important part is any audience

so the important part is any audience you create you can make that a conversion in ga4 so we have audience based conversions not page not session but audience based so the types of advanced conversions you can create are pretty much limitless so if you're e-commerce you can have a conversion for anyone that purchased two or more products or anyone that purchased fifty dollars or more products or anyone in the city of seattle on a desktop who purchased 50 of products so if you think about all those types of

so if you think about all those types of examples those are things again you just really couldn't do in universal so the these conversions as well as some of the elapsed time features are important because they're also going to feed in to a lot of the product integrations i'm about to show you so those are two of my favorite features i'll say the third one for anyone that's a power user or considers themself an advanced google analytics user you've never been able to get the data out of the free version of google

analytics at scale there's apis there's some google sheet connectors but for many of you you'll find they're sampled and they're very limited in the type of data you can export so one of the most popular and important features in the paid version of google analytics was a bigquery integration and what google's done with ga4 is they've taken one of the most important features the reasons why people upgraded to the enterprise version and they've now given it away to all of you uh in

the free version and there's no cost for that integration for the product linking itself so if you're not familiar with bigquery bigquery is a data warehouse and this is where it's going to export a copy of your data and you can use bigquery or in bigquery you could export that data to wherever you want amazon microsoft you can do whatever you want with that data but the important part is this opens up your ability to do advanced analytics you can do predictions you can do

modeling you can integrate your crm and have pii joined with google analytics have pii joined with google analytics data data you can do whatever you want with that data because it's yours and it's in a data warehouse and you can do things with it again that just weren't possible with that universal version and as a bonus i'll give you one last cool feature that i feel like is a hidden one in ga4 but another feature hidden one in ga4 but another feature that that universal just really couldn't do was padding so the padding reports in universal analytics were really

challenging to use and i think created more confusion than they ever helped anyone so in ga4 google's rebuilt padding so if you haven't seen these padding reports in here you can do event padding or you can do page padding by changing your dimensions or metrics but my hidden tip or trick is if you go into the pathing report and you click start over you can actually do backwards and forwards pathing so in here you could say maybe i have a conversion that's really important for me

and in that conversion it's a certain event like maybe i want to look at someone who downloaded something on my someone who downloaded something on my site site and this backwards pathing allows you to see what are the previous events they did prior to that conversion or what are the previous pages they looked at prior to that conversion so this concept of taking your conversion funnels and then working backwards to see what were the most common paths that led your users to is something again you're just never going to be able to get at in that

going to be able to get at in that universal version so these are some of the key differences in ga4 versus universal and again i i share this because a lot of this is only possible because google's made the investment in the new data model and it's moved away from some of that hit based kind of architecture we had which made certain dimensions of metrics incompatible and again it's just a lot more flexible in some of the new use cases we can do

so with that those are some of my favorite features in ga4 i'm happy to share more tips and tricks on this when we get to q a but now i want to transition and cover some of the recent updates that google's made really probably in the past three to six months in ga4 and these new features are going to be again in three key areas they're gonna be the new integrations with google be the new integrations with google products products secondly we're gonna have feature updates mainly around modeling predictions and new attribution and then

lastly there's some new 360 features which i feel like will be a good fun one to show as well so let's start with the first pillar which is going to be the google which is going to be the google integrations integrations so one huge change is if we go into the so one huge change is if we go into the admin admin we can see all of the new product links that are available in ga4 many of these were never available in universal analytics in the free version some of these were only available in the

enterprise version that 360 version of google analytics so for the first time ever all of you if you use display and video 360 which is google's dsp which is google's dsp for for large display and video buys or search ads 360 for managing search campaigns across multiple engines like bing yahoo and google these products are now available in the free version at no additional cost another new one that we'll talk about is

merchant center so if any of you are ecommerce and use merchant center to show your products you can now do conversion exports from ga4 into merchant center so it's linking it there and then in addition google's improved some of the pre-existing links like google optimize so let's start with google optimize so google optimize is google's a b and multivariate testing product this product did link to the previous version of google analytics but google's

rebuilt the integration for ga4 and also changed how this integration works to provide you with more functionality so what is that new functionality well this is my optimize container and i have it linked to my ga4 property and if we start to create an experiment so let's say we wanted to create a test so i'll say demo for a webinar let's say we wanted to do an a b test

the new feature in here is that for the first time you can use audiences from google you can use audiences from google analytics analytics analytics in in in optimize optimize so in here if i go into the audience targeting rules these are who do you want to show the experience to and this audience feature from google analytics was only available in the enterprise version of google optimize but in ga4 google's taken google

optimize and now given you the ability to have the audience feature at no additional cost so i showed you in ga4 like i created that crazy audience right so i went in i went into my reports i have my configure i have some audiences that i published so i have an emoji audience based off pizzas and then i had this blog audience so in google analytics i said show me an audience of anyone who viewed my blog and within 10 minutes they got to my

and within 10 minutes they got to my contact page well in google optimize if i wanted to do an a b test off of that audience i could do that and if you didn't know if i go back in google optimize it's not just about testing so the classic example for optimize is to do landing page tests for paid media but notice you can also do but notice you can also do personalizations personalizations so i could come in and instead say i want to maybe say this is my blog maybe say this is my blog personalization personalization

personalization i can select this new personalization option down here and in the audience uh tool i can say i just want this to be those blog users who viewed that within 10 minutes i'll apply that here i could launch the optimize editor if anyone's never seen the editor for optimize let's say we wanted to do a simple change like maybe i want to reorg my menu nav or maybe i want to try and change some of these images down here so

i can just drag these around hit my save and now if i were to actually publish this personalization live through this personalization live through optimize optimize only these users those who viewed my blog and within 10 minutes would see these changes that i just made to my website and you can see here in optimize i have some tests and personalizations running if you're just curious what the integration looks like you can come in optimize will tell you uh what's winning uh if you should keep your experiment

uh if you should keep your experiment uh if you should keep your experiment running running you can see all the performance so here i test i tested a turtle versus a pineapple and the turtle dominated in this experiment that i ran this experiment that i ran so so this is the optimized integration so the this is the optimized integration so the key key uh performance uh or improvements are for the first time you can use audiences from google analytics in optimize you weren't able to do that in universal except in the in the paid version and then additionally

optimize just like the previous version of google analytics it's going to export its data into the google analytics reports so you're not limited to just having basic experimentation statistics but because it's integrated in google analytics 4 you can see these events down here you can see and analyze the impact of those experiments on everything you're collecting in google analytics the demographics the countries the cities

whatever you want to explore it integrates seamlessly between these two integrates seamlessly between these two products products so that's google optimize the other products that have been integrated in ga4 are going to be some of those new enterprise connectors that were only available in the paid version but now again and ga4 are available for but now again and ga4 are available for everyone everyone so if anyone does large display buys or video buys on youtube google has a product called dv360 which is a dsp again for doing large display and video

again for doing large display and video again for doing large display and video buys buys and the important part here is that google is going to export all of your google is going to export all of your audiences audiences audiences from from google analytics into db360 so you can use these to bid against to exclude include and this is going to be the same as google ads so if you're not using some of the larger google media products i'm sure all of you at some point are going to use google ads and google ads has a very

similar integration so this is also a huge improvement over the previous version of google analytics and the reason it is is if i go into google ads and i go into my audience manager inside my audience manager we're gonna see all of those audiences that we have so if i expand my rows i show all the audiences that i'm using we'll start seeing all my emojis i use emojis for everything but all of these are coming from ga4

and the part that's a really big and the part that's a really big improvement improvement is previously in google analytics you had to manually share every audience into every product so what i mean by that is let's say you wanted to do an audience of users that added something to the cart well you would have to go create that audience log into ga and then press a bunch of buttons and then share it and then if you wanted to create another audience you would have to do the same audience you would have to do the same thing thing

what ga4 does that's different is all the audiences you create so if you create any audience in google analytics by default it's accessible in all of these products so all of the audiences as soon as they're created will immediately show up in google ads you don't have to publish them one by one and then also publish them into optimize and then kind of duplicate all that work so all the audiences are instantly available over there and then in addition uh in many of these

and then in addition uh in many of these products like db360 as well as google ads it's gonna do conversion exports so it's also going to export your conversions for enhanced measurement so search ads 360 is another example of search ads 360 is another example of that that this integration is also available so if anyone has never used search ads 360 this is a product that's like an enterprise version of google ads but it's actually for multiple search engines so you can actually manage bing you can manage google you can manage

multiple search engines in one platform and same thing in this particular product once you get into here uh you're gonna find that you can grab all of your um conversions and your audiences and you can use those in the other products as well um so this is the big improvement again it's all automatic and it's not going to now back to our google integrations there's a brand new one that was never available in either version of google

analytics and this one just launched last week and that's going to be merchant center if you've never used merchant center merchant center is a product mainly for e-commerce that allows you to manage your product inventory on google so if you ever google a product and you see those organic search results where you those organic search results where you have have all of those products kind of show up most of that is managed by google merchant center and the key of this integration i don't have a client or a non-client one that i

can demo but i can tell you what the features are the key of this feature is most of the time in merchant center you're just looking at impressions and clicks of your products but by integrating ga4 it's actually going to export your conversions so anyone that clicks on any of those merchant center results google is going to auto tag so it's going to add in all the campaign parameters and then it's going to export the conversions into merchant center so if you have purchase events that's going to show up back in the merchant center platform so you can

the merchant center platform so you can start doing attribution and start optimizing kind of your organic optimizing kind of your organic merchant merchant results that you're kind of populating from those products so again this is a feature that was not available before and just rolled out last week in this new version of ga4 so those are the google integrations uh there are some pre-existing ones if anyone has questions on those i'm happy to cover those in the q a but google's had ad manager bigquery and

but google's had ad manager bigquery and some of these other ones for quite some some of these other ones for quite some time time the ones we just covered are the brand new ones that google's rolled out new ones that google's rolled out recently recently so with that let's transition to feature updates so google's made what i would say is probably uh three key feature updates in probably the last three to six months to ga4 the first is going to be around the first is going to be around attribution attribution so attribution is always a really challenging subject because most of us who have used google analytics

who have used google analytics and for the for most of our life are intimately familiar that google analytics by default uses a last non-direct attribution model so what that means is in universal analytics all of the default reports are basically last click by default so ga4 has tried to improve some of the insights and capabilities we can get around attribution so if you've explored or have a ga4

property you've probably seen the acquisition section and there's different kind of attribution capabilities in different reports so user acquisition is showing you what was the first user source that led to a conversion so you can come in and if you wanted to do how did we acquire that user and what conversion did it lead to you can easily come in and i could say for this emoji conversion i have what was the first traffic source that led to that conversion

led to that conversion and this first touch again was something we really didn't have in universal we have the standard last uh touch through the traffic acquisition so this part has uh uh this will be familiar to pretty much everyone this is how google analytics has really always worked and then we have a new setting so if we go into the admin in the admin setting there's a section called attribution settings and here there's a setting where you can change the attribution model for what

change the attribution model for what the reports use and there's two key changes here first google's rolled out data-driven attribution uh data driven was a feature that was mainly only available in the enterprise version of ga360 or a particular beta called the attribution beta but it wasn't available kind of in the standard attribution reports in universal so google's taken data driven attribution actually rolled it out as the default and made it available to the default and made it available to everyone everyone

and then in addition we have the other attribution models so last first linear position time or even ads preferred you can change what the default attribution model of ga4 is so i have mine set to data driven and the way this works is if you go into your reports and in your reports you go into events sorry you go into conversions in the conversions section as soon as

you click on an event so maybe let's say i'll click on scroll i have a scroll conversion if we look at this report notice that when we look at the conversions per channel i'll zoom in it's not whole numbers there's fractions in here so 0.56 0.21 0.92 this is the data driven attribution model where it's actually fractionally assigning credit uh to the conversions

so once you drill in this is where you can change the default conversions uh or the conversion model or attribution model of google analytics for the first model of google analytics for the first time time so i could go to my admin i could go back to the attribution settings and i could change this to settings and i could change this to linear linear and some of you might panic because previously in google analytics when you did stuff like that it would permanently change your data so it would only apply point in time forward and it would be very destructive

very destructive that's not the case with ga4 in ga4 i can go back to my reports i can go back to my conversions and now in my conversions if i click on and now in my conversions if i click on scroll scroll what's going to happen now is this is a linear attribution model so before i had .59 now i have 0.50 so it's actually .59 now i have 0.50 so it's actually divided divided all of the uh credit by linear so it's just splitting it equally and the reason there's fractions is if you have only three

fractions is if you have only three sources that led to a conversion then each one would have 0.33 because it would split it right so this shows you that you can actually change the attribution model on the fly in ga4 and there's a lot of settings like that in ga4 which are designed to not be destructive like they were in universal so we talked about goals like you couldn't delete a goal in like you couldn't delete a goal in universal universal you can change the reporting identity in

ga4 on the fly it doesn't permanently change any of your data so that's one feature i do really like in ga4 is that you can change a lot of things on the fly so that's the attribution feature the important part there is for the first time we can change those attribution time we can change those attribution models models and they're accessible again on the fly the other part that's important about uh conversions so for another feature update it's gonna be around modeling

so if you all are not familiar with modeling uh it's gonna be really important to get comfortable with model data because uh that's what all of our market all of us marketers are gonna be using in this new kind of privacy-centric uh world that we're moving into and that we're already in so what is it about modeling that's important well there's two key parts first is google rolled out some updates last year where all of the conversions are modeled by default

by default so this already happens in google ads it already happens in facebook because of safari and other changes where we no longer have cookies that last they're stripped down to seven days or even one stripped down to seven days or even one day day or other certain situations google now actually models conversions by default to try and restore some of the conversion signal loss that's happening because of the degradation around cookies so some of that

around cookies so some of that functionality which has been available in google ads for quite some time is now available in ga4 by default so these conversions will be modeled by these conversions will be modeled by default default additionally in europe there's a lot of challenges right now around consent so and that can happen in other regions as well but the challenge is is if you implement a consent platform and you only track someone in google analytics when they provide consent it means the amount of traffic and the

it means the amount of traffic and the amount of users you're able to track are usually going to substantially decrease overnight so for my clients that implement like a consent framework they might see more than 50 of their traffic lost because they choose to opt out and not to opt in and that is a huge challenge because the importance of google analytics or analytics in general is to be directional we want to have it to

provide directional insights so we can make marketing and advertising decisions and if all of a sudden we lose 50 of our traffic there's a good chance that some of those insights are no longer directional meaning the data we collected if we did have all the data to compare it against some of the increases and decreases that we were seeing might not actually align with what the full data set would have shown so it could potentially lose out on the directionalness which again makes it significantly challenging to

makes it significantly challenging to use google analytics or any platform to make decisions so google's taking a big step forward to help marketers in this area where they've implemented something called consent mode so if anyone hasn't heard of consent mode all of the features for consent mode are already available so you can implement the uh architecture of consent mode but basically the way it works is you have a setting where you can tell google analytics as well as other google products like google ads

other google products like google ads when and when it should not use cookies or identifiers or identifiers so so in this way you could perhaps have a way where if a user opts out of google analytics you decide that you're not going to track any identifiable information so you're not going to track a client id you're not going to track a user id but you're just going to track that a page you occurred but really nothing about that page you so that's how consent mode works is

so that's how consent mode works is basically it tracks the data in aggregate it's going to track all of your page views but some of those page views will no longer have an id like a client id or a user id associated with client id or a user id associated with it it so what google's doing with consent mode is they're going to be introducing behavioral modeling so behavioral modeling is going to be a feature where it's going to take the aggregate data it's going to take all of the aggregate page use and then that's going to take your consented data and it's going to build a model that's

it's going to build a model that's custom to you and your users and the data you're collecting and it's going to model that behavior off of those aggregates to try and restore the directionalness behind your data so the cool part is consent mode is already available so you can implement it like in google tag manager or another tag management system and the bigquery integration that we talked about earlier all those consent flags will show up in bigquery and then google said that very soon the

and then google said that very soon the ui is gonna have the behavioral modeling feature in it so it's gonna help really solve a lot of those consent challenges that many of us might be faced with again when we're working with consent or in europe or some of those other things so 95 of the features available we're just missing the ui feature to be able to model that data but it's coming soon and this is why i kind of go back working with model data is something all of us are going to have to get very

comfortable with as marketers so we already have that with conversion modeling we already have that in many of our advertising platforms to help with itp and other changes that have rolled itp and other changes that have rolled out out and we're gonna have even more model data when we start working with consent platforms and other components as well so it's something not to avoid but it's gonna actually be a benefit for all of us in the long term so one last thing i wanted to show i'm going to switch accounts real quick to show this feature so there's another set of features that

so there's another set of features that google's rolled out in ga4 so i'm using the google analytics for demo account uh google has a free demo account if anyone wants to play around with ga4 just google ga4 demo account and you can have access to this same data set but what i wanted to show you here is that google is making significant investments into predictive capabilities so for many marketers you don't have probably a data science team you don't have resources to go in and do

a predictive lifetime value or what's the predictive predictive chance that someone's going to come back and convert um you just don't have those resources available or maybe you just don't have the time so what google's trying to do with ga4 is they're trying to give advanced kind of marketing capabilities uh to everyone so that you can kind of take advantage of this and more accurately reach and target and be more effective with your budgets and your marketing campaigns so to show you a little bit about that

so to show you a little bit about that if you do do e-commerce google's built a bunch of predictive capabilities in the platform so if i come into google analytics and i build a user segment inside here you'll actually see we have many of the predict predictions that are available by default available by default and and it looks like i accidentally lost my demo account so so let me go back

so let me go back now that i'm in the demo account for now that i'm in the demo account for reals reals if i go into explore i collect segments we should see so in here google has a bunch of so in here google has a bunch of predictions predictions so these predictions are going to be based off of churn uh likelihood to convert and a few other kind of key

things and the important part here is that again they're going to be created out of the box i'm not sure why they disappeared i feel like i'm still not in the demo account so i might have to come back to this example something always goes wrong in demos so let me try it a different way so if i go to explore i go to the template go to explore i go to the template gallery gallery we have a predictive top spenders we have a predictive top spenders workbook workbook and in here you can see out of the box if i open this predictive top spenders if i open this predictive top spenders workbook workbook

workbook google's building predictive revenue so based off of who's coming from a channel for the first time it's predicting how much revenue they're actually going to be worth out of the box and the important part here now i can see it so now if i click on a new can see it so now if i click on a new segment segment you can see i have these predictive segments down here so these are the predictions out of the box so you can do who's likely to purchase in the next seven days who's likely to not visit you again in

the next seven days who's gonna be your top spenders who's gonna be a first-time purchaser or someone who's not likely to purchase in the next seven days so the way these work is google basically does all of the hard data science work for you behind the scenes so here it's saying i want to look at anyone with a per purchase probability that's in the 90th percentile so what google does is it looks at various signals what's the traffic

source maybe what's their geography how many pages did they look at and then based off of their own kind of custom engagement of users who converted it looks at the commonality in those it looks at the commonality in those conversions conversions and then looks at their first visit and it tries to identify for someone new that's coming to the site what do they have in common with the users we already know who have the users we already know who have purchased purchased and the cool part here is you can actually come in and you can customize these predictions so you can say i don't want to just look at the top 10 of my

users who are most likely to convert maybe i want to change this and say i want the top 20 so you can actually play with the sliders for your prediction scores so you can have more or less audiences but one key uh benefit of this is let's go back to google ads let's say you're a small marketer and you want to you know be more savvy and you have a limited ad budget and one of the hard parts of a limited ad budget is you don't have enough budget to show ads to all of your

budget to show ads to all of your qualified users qualified users so so one thing you would probably want to make sure you're doing is you're not showing ads to users who are likely to showing ads to users who are likely to convert convert because it's wasted ad budget you want to save that ad budget to try and get users who are close to converting but not very likely to convert or maybe even just focus on people who are even less qualified than that so the way you could use this is say maybe i want to take my users who are 50

to 80 percent likely to convert and if i create that as a conversion or as an audience this will immediately show up in google ads and i could do bid adjustments against this audience or i could take that audience that's 80 or higher and i could exclude them from seeing ads i could actually apply an exclusion condition to them and you can also build that as different tests you could just try running a test in google ads and then see if it had any impact to your roads but this again opens up an

your roads but this again opens up an ability for marketers who don't have a data science team to be more savvy so right now unfortunately a lot of these predictions that we looked at are centered around e-commerce but i would fully expect that google rolls out other predictive capabilities for different predictive capabilities for different verticals verticals hopefully later this year so this is another kind of a key improvement in ga4 so with that i did want to show one last feature so we've talked about the google integrations we've talked about some of the core feature updates the last one i

just wanted to show you is a new feature called rollups and sub properties unfortunately this feature is only going to be available in the enterprise to be available in the enterprise version version i personally hope that google changes that at some point and gives users and the free version uh some of at least a certain amount of these uh in the basic version so we'll have to see what google does in the long term but i'll start with sub properties so i created these off of emojis like i do

everything but sub properties is a new feature that solves a challenge that many of us have in the free version of ga4 which is you can't create views we don't have views like we did in don't have views like we did in universal universal so views maybe you had a property in google analytics where you had it on your entire website so you're tracking all the webs all the web behavior and every page someone sees it was very common historically to

create views so you could have a view of only your blog or only your career site or only your us traffic or only your traffic in canada and in ga4 we don't really have a concept of views so sub properties is google's kind of view level replacement feature or a view level uh kind of proxy and the way this feature works is you can come in and i'll just show you if i were to create a brand new property it asks you whether you want to create a

regular property or a sub property and a sub property what it is is it's a server side property that basically creates a copy of the data you're collecting in a a new property so if i can get this to work what should show up here is it should show me a filter so let me show you this a different way since that appears to be a different way since that appears to be broken broken if i go into my sub property management i have one set up to only track traffic

from my blog and that one also appears to not be and that one also appears to not be working working here we go so i'll do it one more time now if i create property i go to sub property this is what the filter looks like so you give it a name so i could say i only want to track my blog i'll call this v2 i select where do i want the data to come from so i want to come from my main website where i'm tracking all of my website where i'm tracking all of my data data and then the key here is you add a

filter so in the filter you say what data do you want to filter in or to exclude or include into this property so a simple example was you could say i want anything with a page path that contains blog and if i were to hit apply and save this then in google analytics in my account selector if i go here i have my full selector if i go here i have my full property property so this would be all of my data about my so this would be all of my data about my website website and then the sub property would only be

the traffic from my blog so it's that filtered kind of view where these 4 200 users are just my blog and then in the total if i go to the main property i have all the traffic for my blog and everywhere else on my my blog and everywhere else on my website website so if you're on the free version uh you won't have sub properties so the main way to to kind of do the slices that you would do in the past is going to be through applying audiences

so there's really robust audience features and then there's data studio but again i hope google takes the sub properties and makes them available kind of more broadly but that's how sub properties work roll ups are going to be pretty much exactly the same so if i showed you what a rollup was that's where if i click create property i go to roll up i could say this is my combined view so maybe i have one property for my app traffic and another property for my web traffic and maybe i have multiple

web traffic and maybe i have multiple brands maybe i have kate spade i have brands maybe i have kate spade i have coach coach and i actually manage different brands as a single company well a roll up just allows you to come in and select all of your individual in and select all of your individual properties properties and then it'll combine it together so in my pizza plus pineapple up here this is a roll up of multiple properties that i have running on the adsworth site and it just again combines all that data into a global place so the nice part is is this is all server side so

part is is this is all server side so you're not adding additional tags to the website to track data in different places google does it for you all kind of behind the scenes so with that those are kind of the key features i wanted to go through so again i showed you all the key differences of why we're talking about ga4 versus universal we talked about the new integrations so google has improved integrations personally i think the google optimize integration is one of the more exciting ones because we have the new google

ones because we have the new google audiences that are now available natively and optimized to do personalization against so if anyone's running google ads campaigns not only can you use it for landing page but you can also use it to personalize the experience as well we talked about the feature updates i'm really looking forward to the behavioral modeling feature to help with a lot of the consent challenges in emea and then in addition we're starting to see some of the power google analytics has around having flexible attribution

and then we're also starting to see some of the improvements google's making to their enterprise offering so those rule opposition sub properties are also starting to come online as well so with that we will be sending a bunch of resources to everyone here these are also available on our blog but if you're new to ga4 we have get started guides we also have a variety of webinars where we talk about all the differences between universal and ga4 so if you want to learn more we have those

learn more we have those in addition if anyone's looking for help we've helped over a hundred companies move and implement uh ga4 so if anyone needs help getting started definitely feel free to contact us after we can do ga4 implementations all day long and with that i wanted to transition to the q a so let me pop up the q a uh i don't have a hard stop so all of you can hang on for as long as you like but i'm gonna try and get through as

so someone said that the uh webinar was only in stereo so that's funny i'll have to look at that after a question was on when the ga4 depart or sorry when the universal deprecation was was it in july of 2022 or july of 2021 so it's going to be july of 2022 so you so it's going to be july of 2022 so you have have

have more than 13 months to get ready for this new version of google analytics before again universal stops processing new data so again you want to get started with ga4 to build up that historical data a question from chris uh the data structure in ga4 is different than universal especially in bigquery how should power users plan on mirroring the ga4 interface and automated reporting using bigquery

ga4 data sets so if you're trying to mirror reports between ga and bigquery my guess is that right now it's a it's it's it's kind of manual because there's not a lot of tutorials that are not a lot of tutorials that are available available i'm gonna guess in the next three to six months there's gonna be a blog post and queries that you can just copy uh with a simple google search so for power users i would probably recommend holding off

before manually going in and building all of your bigquery uh reports off of all of your bigquery uh reports off of that that because someone's going to save you a lot of time later by doing that all work for you but if you do want to get started there's some really great resources i know simo has a bunch of blog posts on know simo has a bunch of blog posts on it it our colleagues luca and andre write about bigquery on our sites a lot but there's definitely great places to get started aaron you asked can we import 360 data into ga4 unfortunately since ga4 is a very

different data model than the previous version of google analytics google doesn't have a historical data import feature so there's no way to import historical data into ga4 um so if you did want to connect ga4 with historical data the best way to do that is going to be inside that marketing data warehouse we talked about so if you export your ga4 data into bigquery uh you'll have all that raw data and then if you're on the 360

data and then if you're on the 360 version of google analytics today you also have data in bigquery and you can actually connect the cookies uh or if you're on the free version uh there's a bunch of tools you can use to export aggregate data out so you could export that data again and then try and uh uh there's a question from david could we use data studio to blend ga3s to blend universal analytics with ga4

to uh combine a complete view of data so you could use data studio to do blends between both versions of google analytics uh personally i would probably find it a bit challenging to do that so what i'm advising my customers to do is ideally uh most of us are still using universal as our primary solution like personally i use universal for probably 90 plus of what i do and i use ga4 for about 10 of things i

and i use ga4 for about 10 of things i use it for some of the new funnels some of the new padding but personally there's lots of things that i'm waiting for google to release on the roadmap and make easier but what i'm doing is i'm doing the implementation for ga4 so i'm collecting data in both places and then my plan is sometime next year when i'm ready and i feel like i can get everything i need in ga4 i'll start moving over to just doing things in ga4 instead of doing it in both

and the part there is as soon as ga4 has like 13 months of data you no longer probably need to connect it to universal so you'd only need to bridge the two versions probably if you have less than 13 months of data and for me personally i'm just going to wait until ga4 has enough data where i feel like i don't necessarily need to connect it to the previous version at connect it to the previous version at all is there a way to archive 360 data so if you're on the 360 version of google analytics aaron absolutely you just set

analytics aaron absolutely you just set up your bigquery integration and then that will be available in your data warehouse for as long as you want it to warehouse for as long as you want it to be be eli asked are additional custom metrics and dimensions expected to be made available these are far fewer in ga4 available these are far fewer in ga4 um um you're asking can we get session scoped and what's our recommendation for replacing existing session scoped so session scoped custom dimensions as well as product scopes custom dimensions are

missing in ga4 we don't have those yet however google has promised that those are coming so we'll have both of those session and both of those custom dimension scopes that you're used to available hopefully sometime soon in ga4 so i would just recommend waiting and then for additional custom dimensions and metrics there are differences in the free and the paid version so for some reason if you use all of them uh the enterprise version would have more slots that you

uh chris you said if an organization was very dependent on universal would we be able to use server side to continue to send data to server side to continue to send data to universal universal after those dates that google shared so that's not going to work unfortunately because the processing will cut off the processing from all data sources into into google analytics so uh basically universal uh you'll only be able to access the data in it after

those dates in 2023 but you won't be able to collect new data i'm doing a lot of work with server side but not necessarily for that reason someone asked i saw an event with emojis is that possible so you can send them emojis as events all day long i i definitely encourage it uh someone asked on audience conversions can you use the source from utms so someone that lands from facebook so

that's a question from eric so for audience conversions you could absolutely use the source so if you want to create a conversion of anyone that came from facebook in the audience builder you would just select a source of facebook and then for medium you could either do paid organic social or both depending on what type of uh facebook source it is uh jeremy asked do audience-based events also export to bigquery so we created

also export to bigquery so we created the audience of people who viewed my blog and within 10 minutes they got to my contact page that will definitely export to bigquery that will definitely export to bigquery so so i have some customers that are using bigquery as like a customer data bigquery as like a customer data platform platform so basically since it's a data warehouse you can dump all of your first party data from ga in there and let's say you connected your data warehouse like bigquery to your email platform like let's say mailchimp or salesforce marketing cloud you could actually

use those audience events and then activate kind of other marketing activities for those so you can do super advanced stuff based off that uh christopher you asked has google made any announcements about other location hosting capabilities so google did a privacy webinar last week and they did make some announcements there wasn't a lot of details in them but basically they said there was going to be new features based off of recent rulings in

europe to do regional based compliance and then it also mentioned there's going to be more updates to ip address so it'll have more control over not using ip addresses that sounds like at all or severely limited or differently than how it works today um so anyways google made announcements around that and we're expecting to hopefully hear some news on that in the coming weeks so stay tuned uh we will have a recording

there's a question felipe asked google analytics 4 frequently applies a threshold to custom reports why is this happening so let me switch the ga4 because this is something that often frustrates me so i'll show you why that happens and also give you a kind of a quick tip if all of you are getting started with ga4 in the admin uh there is two settings for reporting identity and in the reporting identity you can have it report off of the anonymous id so this is going to be the cookie

or the new identity which could be user ids so if you have someone log into your website you can send those user ids or you can even use google signals google signals is google's cross device graph so these are signed in google users where google will try and connect cross behave across device behavior based off of that if you use this option as your default reporting identity what you're going to start seeing as you start interacting with various reports

start interacting with various reports in google analytics is you'll notice this yellow triangle that says thresholding has been applied so because if i go back to this setting this setting is using google's cross device graph it's also making sure that individual users aren't being identified so it's removing basically very low volume rows from the reports volume rows from the reports so so you have two options uh if you don't want your reports to be thresholded or

you find it annoying then switch to device only or turn off google signals those are going to be the two options there uh personally i mostly use device only right now and i'm hoping google in the future gives us an ability to actually have a third option here of just user id and device id um which i think would give us the best of both worlds uh how would i compare path exploration to adobe analytics um so i think fundamentally it's pretty similar i have

fundamentally it's pretty similar i have heard that the adobe reports are a little bit more sophisticated or advanced in certain areas um but my hope is that google releases a lot of updates to make them even more comparable in the future jessica asked we utilize product scope custom dimensions will those ever become custom dimensions will those ever become available available google's promised that they're coming i'm also waiting so hopefully we'll have those soon muhammad asked will data and ga4 be all user audience based no longer session

based data at all um so that's a common misconception of google analytics in that it's not session based or doesn't have session based capabilities so i'll give you some examples if we go into acquisition we go in the traffic into acquisition we go in the traffic acquisition acquisition uh you have sessions available out of the box so right here sessions are available in ga4 and additionally if i go back to the audience section and we wanted to build an audience we can create session scoped audiences as well and in fact there's

audiences as well and in fact there's even another option so if i create this custom audience uh i'm sorry let me go into explore in the explore section in these custom in the explore section in these custom audiences audiences you have session scoped right here but you also have event scoped so this was something you couldn't do in universal analytics you could only do show me all users or show me all sessions where something happened in ga4 you can do what a lot of people in adobe always like to brag about you could do event

scope segments only show me the events where something occurred so not only do we have session scopes but we also have event scoped as well uh same question i know that sessions are now tracked differently but how are they different what defines a session in they different what defines a session in ga4 ga4 so sessions are mostly similar it's still by default up to 30 minutes of inactivity is what a session is you can also customize that there are differences where in some of

the advanced attribution capabilities actually having a new traffic source no longer break sessions longer break sessions so so for some of the attribution kind of pathing reports it's even more flexible from a session perspective but largely it's similar a question from jeff as we move from ua to ga4 should we stream from both versions to bigquery so if you're on ga360 i would absolutely recommend you set up both uh one big change in ga4 is

set up both uh one big change in ga4 is the the bigquery does not backfill so in universal analytics if you did have the bigquery integration it would do a historical export but in ga4 it only exports point in time forward so definitely basically on day one if you can set up your bigquery integration there's questions here about how could bigquery create engagement time metrics so select unnest we can share some tips and tricks with that after the webinar

our google optimize conversions felipe asked based off of users or event count so the google optimized conversions if i go in here i'll just show you what the conversions look like so here it's going to be off of the events but we also have a concept of the client so you have the user and the event and then it also tells you how many events so as an example if i say i'm looking at scrolls i can see there is on average 5.4 i can see there is on average 5.4 scrolls scrolls

per client so it gives you kind of all three slices of that anna great to see you you asked about amp so google i think on their github repository said amp support is coming but they posted that in december and i haven't heard anything about amp since then so i hope it comes but haven't heard any i hope it comes but haven't heard any updates updates will there be any integrations with

google ad manager so there is a gam connector but it's mostly app only uh i hope google has a gam integration i i haven't seen any announcements on that uh there's a question here on expiration so someone's asking how does the expiration settings work in ga4 this is a really important setting um and this will often trip up a lot of people so if you take anything away from this webinar maybe

remember this one tip ga4 by default has a data retention ga4 by default has a data retention setting setting so if you go into ga4 and we go into data settings there's a new data retention setting by default when you create a new property it's set to two months by property it's set to two months by default default and you can change it in the free version to up to 14 months and then in the 360 version you have these additional options so in the free version you have either two months or 14 version you have either two months or 14 months months if you leave it at two months

what that means is that the raw kind of tables get dropped after two months so the aggregates will always be there so this is an important change in ga4 there's basically two sets of capabilities in the product there's the standard reports and then there's the free form or the advanced reports as you might call it so standard reports and freeform reports these standard reports the data will always be available in here even after the expiration

the expiration but the challenge is the standard reports are a lot more limited in the types of analysis you can do those funnels those pathing reports a lot of those cool features i showed you those are not in the standard reports those features are all in this explorations report and that data retention setting affects how much data you have to use inside the explorations module so if you leave your data retention setting at two months it means you only

have two months of data to work with and i hope google changes the property setup to highlight that setting more because i feel like a lot of people get surprised that that's what's happening that they can't access more than two months of can't access more than two months of data data so it's something definitely to watch out for so one tip check your data retention setting and change it if it makes sense for your business and two make sure you enable the bigquery integration uh to also give you more coverage as well you more coverage as well uh uh someone has to sleep it will have a

someone has to sleep it will have a recording don't worry is there any deadline for ga4 for 360 properties so for 360 uh it's going to be october so you get an extra three months the free version stops pro stops processing in july and the 360 version stops processing in october a question on rogue referrals is the issue resolved in ga4 so ga uh rogue referrals is an issue that commonly happens with single page apps which was

a real challenge in universal analytics ga4 tries to make it easier to solve for that challenge with a new setting in enhanced measurement so if anyone hasn't ever used enhanced measurement this is a new setting ga4 has so in the admin when you create ga4 for the first admin when you create ga4 for the first time time it actually does auto tracking out of the box and that auto tracking out of the box if i can get this to work it actually will track scrolls page

views videos without you having to do anything like in google tag manager and for single page apps this box right here is usually checked where it'll track browser history events by default so that's one way google tries to solve for the rogue referral issue and then in addition there's lots of great blog posts like cmo and others have on how to manually do that so conceptually the custom dimensions are available you can access data

uh do you know whether google will allow search console on the sub property level in the future so let me double check uh yeah i'm not sure about sub uh yeah i'm not sure about sub properties properties so it looks like we don't have search console at a sub property level we only have google ads right now so i hope in the future that google will allow that

the future that google will allow that so it's a good feature request there's a question on adsense or add x there's a question on adsense or add x so so amanda adsense adex and gam for web are all missing so hopefully we'll have that maybe by the end of the year but i haven't heard do you know when we'll get more e-commerce list attribution and other reports so e-commerce is another area i think that google's still improving

there are some dimensions and metrics which aren't auto-registered by default which can be a bit frustrating so i would expect to see more changes than that in the rest of the year benjamin you asked when we change the attribution model in ga does it impact the bigquery data that we're exporting and it would not bigquery is only going to export the raw data so there's not really a concept of attribution that's applied in the in the raw data so that's somewhere where you actually have to rebuild some of that if you wanted to do that in your data

warehouse the question is the attribution model only for conversion data or can we use different types of attribution so here's something that some of you might find that's fun if we go into the attribution modeling section so in ga4 there's a whole section called advertising and in here you have model comparison and you also have conversion paths so this used to be like multi-channel funnels where we can see all the paths that led to a conversion

that led to a conversion your ability to segment has been substantially increased in ga4 so if we click this add a filter button you can actually cre isolate the conversion pass for audiences or for a variety of other conditions the multi-channel funnels area of universal was much more rigid where you didn't necessarily have all of these dimensions like saying show me anyone that purchased more than fifty dollars a product and show me all of their conversion paths those

is the attribution based on the conversion level or a cohort it's all based on the conversion but some of it's modeled is the answer to some of it's modeled is the answer to that that is there a difference between conversions and purchases slash transactions in ga4 uh conceptually there are two different metrics but the way they're incremented is exactly the way they're incremented is exactly the same by editing the conversion model it doesn't change for google ads that's

doesn't change for google ads that's doesn't change for google ads that's correct correct uh can we look at attribution model side by side so great question alan and since i'm in here if you click on model i'm in here if you click on model comparison comparison you can compare your different attributions side by side directly in this model comparison report so i could take uh last click and then compare it to linear and then on the right hand side it shows me the right hand side it shows me the conversions conversions and the differences here so organic social just got 16 percent less credit and linear and that means something else got 16

and that means something else got 16 and that means something else got 16 more more uh someone asked how i got emojis in the report i just added an emoji in google tag manager um unless i missed it channel reporting was demonstrated but not session and medium so in ga4 if we go to reports and you go to acquisition uh by default google now kind of defaults to channels i hope that we get custom channels that would be awesome but for your question uh we have all of the standard source

mediums in the drop down so in the standard reports if you just click the dimension many reports in ga4 have other primary dimensions you can choose so if you wanted to do your utm medium or just the medium in general you can just grab uh well conversions exported be based off of event count yep they're all the event counts by default what is the difference between ga4 and

firebase so conceptually uh google analytics for firebase and ga4 or one on the same uh in fact if you implement a firebase project now you have to use ga4 as the analytics component inside firebase uh and when you look at what happened with app plus web and it transitioning to ga4 google just took the firebase data model and made it ga4 so i view them pretty much as one on the same them pretty much as one on the same and and

can we change the attribution model in can you please clarify when conversions are modeled versus they're not so if you're using the raw data in your bigquery none of that's going to be modeled but when you're in the ui and you're in some of the conversion reports they will be modeled i can try and grab the help center article for you

it's a little bit opaque right now i hope google makes this easier um so i'll give you like one feature request that i asked google to do so i showed you all how if i go into my main property we can access those flexible conversion models right we go into engagement we go into conversions and as soon as i click into one of these i'm using the attribution model that i set at my property level what i hope google does is i hope they add tool tips so that when you hover

over these you can actually see what attribution model you're using and then you can also better understand when things are being modeled so that's a feature request i have for hopefully google will make that for hopefully google will make that easier easier there's a question about uh from um there's a question about uh from um uh uh daniel who asked what about the future of ga4 and server side do we think that all tags in the future will be in gtm server side so the thing about server side is a lot of

people i think don't realize most marketing is dependent on cookies that have to exist in the client-side browser so if you want to find someone on the internet later to show them advertising or to do personalization and other parts like that most of that is still dependent on most of that is still dependent on cookies cookies so at least for today and probably for you know the next year or so some component of client side tagging is still going to be very prevalent for

most marketers because again we want to find them and reach them later but with everything that is happening there is starting to be a lot of adoption in the server side and even bridged solutions where maybe some of your ga4 implementation is client-side and other parts are server-side so i think there is a future where server-side starts to become more and more dominant and we're starting to see some of the move there but it still feels pretty early uh benedict asked is the data modeled in

bigquery it is not it is the raw data how will ga4 work when google removes the use of third-party cookies so ga4 at least from a foundational perspective will be largely unimp impacted by third-party cookies because its default identifier is a first-party cookie the third-party cookie deprecation heavily impacts advertising platforms so in google that's going to be their display platforms or facebook ads that are offside facebook

are offside facebook most kind of display most kind of display buys buys all use third-party cookies so some of the advertising integrations might be infected but also know that google and all the other advertising platforms as well as all the other industry kind of groups are working on certain proposals for what will replace a third-party cookie just no one's agreed on what that's going to be yet google just rolled out topics api as their most recent one so it will remain to be seen

recent one so it will remain to be seen what's going to kind of bridge the advertising integrations but ga will largely be unimpacted by third-party largely be unimpacted by third-party cookies cookies uh bart asked can we fix data retroactively in ga4 uh nope not yet but that would be a great feature request i would love that you can fix it in bigquery just not the ui uh fernanda asked are the consent pings being recorded inside ga4 so right now it's showing up in the bigquery

integration so it's it's uh i guess you could say it's being recorded it's just not being shown in the ui so that behavioral modeling feature we talked [Music] [Music] someone asked how is this an effective solution today if if google's rolling out all these new features and changes so great question joseph i would say again i'm not approaching ga4 as a

replacement at least for me quite yet to universal i'm preparing for it to be the replacement but for my day-to-day i'm still heavily using universal analytics and my hope is is that you know as the as the dates come closer till july of next year um it'll be a lot easier and it'll just make sense it'll kind of just be intuitive when the right times to move over the most important part right now for marketers and for the 300 plus of you who are still on

here uh you want to implement the data to start collecting so you have it for later it doesn't mean you have to drop everything and start using ga4 from the start from the start uh uh can we can we reuse our bigquery project for ga4 you sure can your computer or let's see is predictions only available for is predictions only available for purchases purchases uh so there is churn predictions but almost all of the predictions are ecommerce only so hopefully that gets ecommerce only so hopefully that gets added added

uh deleting events so data deletion is another huge improvement in ga4 so google rolled out completely new data deletion features uh so the user data deletion in particular has been uh substantially improved so if you ever do need to delete data it shouldn't be as destructive as it was in universal um do we know when the optimize integration is going to be available to everyone it already is so if you go into optimize you can link it to ga4 from optimize you can link it to ga4 from today today

um how do you deal with loss of e-commerce data because of consent opt-outs uh consent mode is google's answer to that do we have cross-domain tracking in ga4 we sure do if we go into the admin section of ga4 and you go into i believe your data streams we click on your streams at the very bottom there's more tagging settings and in here you can configure your domains for cross-domain measurement so this is a big change previously cross-domain was technical

previously cross-domain was technical stuff where you had to go change google tag manager and go through all these hoops in ga4 you just list your domains here and ga4 does the cross domain automatically directly in the ui uh sub properties was only ga360. we will share the presentation actually we probably won't share their presentation because i don't have anything in it but we will share the [Music] [Music]

how do you backup universal data for free accounts so the backup is something a lot of people are asking about right a lot of people are asking about right now now so it's likely going to be something if you want to back up the data that you have in universal it's going to be through the google analytics api and it's going to be storing that data in like google sheets or maybe a database so my guess is in the next three to six months there's going to be a variety of people in the community potentially even google that are going to release some options to get some of

to release some options to get some of your data out of the version right now so if you can i'd probably wait a little bit before you invest in exporting data just because it's going to get just because it's going to get simplified simplified someone asked about the cost for sub properties so when you use a sub property or a rollup in ga360 there is additional cost uh so everything you send to the sub property or the roll up is an additional half of an event so the standard version of

ga4360 includes up to 25 million events in the base version and then there's variable pricing if you go above that so they'll just be overages and it'll be charged as a half hit for everything you send to those hit for everything you send to those features features amanda you asked about the key differences between uh 360 and ga4 so let me see if i can pull that up real so let me see if i can pull that up real quick quick so the honest answer is there's really not a whole lot right now but i'm guessing it's going to change throughout

the year so mainly the differences between the free and the paid version are first you get more of everything and those are generally around limits more audiences more conversion so 50 instead of 30. but notice there's no real integrations that are only in the paid version it's very different to how the 360 version works with universal the biggest advantages right now is the sampling so in the explore module you get significantly higher sampling rates

which you need for large data sets and then the bigquery export is and then the bigquery export is unlimited unlimited in the enterprise version and it also includes an sla so those are the main differences right now there's probably going to be a lot more that kind of come online throughout the year um there's a question from adam we're a 360 paid subscriber i've heard we can only do 50. so if you're on the version of 360 today you can upgrade to the ga4

360 at no additional cost there's a free beta for it you just need to go into your platform home or ask google or your reseller or us to help you enable it but there's a free beta right now for anyone that's using ga360 for ga4 and once you're on that beta you can have these higher limits so you wouldn't have 50 uh custom dimensions you'd have 125. [Music]

is there any plans for the explore tab to have a longer look back window so the look back window is your data retention setting so adam you just need to change that data retention setting um thanks for the feedback the behavioral flow report is going to be your pathing report that we talked about victor can you activate ga4 to start building history while still using universal so michelle absolutely that's what i'm doing again i only spend 10 percent of my time in ga4 i spend most of my time

still in universal can you confirm that ga360 users have until at least um october until data is no longer collected that's right that's correct rich october first of next year and then you have at least six months after where you can still log into the after where you can still log into the ui ui someone asked about managing users so google has all the manage user features in here and they've actually enhanced them so if you need to manage users um you can do that at either a sub property or a property level and then google's

or a property level and then google's added new controls where if you add a new user you can actually restrict what sort of data they have access to so no revenue no cost and then all the is there a reason i don't use google signals so i share that nolan i don't like the thresholding that i run into so i use device id quite a bit in ga4 uh google ad manager hopefully coming uh google ad manager hopefully coming later later

later what are the risks of running both at the same time uh there's really no risk there's a slight performance like really slight performance maybe concern you could have because you're running two tags on your site at the same time however they're both asynchronous so the actual page impact should be nothing um so by far the vast majority of our 360 customers are running both at the same customers are running both at the same time time brent you asked can we get certified in

google analytics for so google analytics i'm sorry google uh hasn't rolled out a certification test yet and they also haven't really rolled out training uh yet so i would expect there to be a new certification and a lot more to be a new certification and a lot more training training throughout this year there's a question josh asked do we have to set up tags so if you have google tag manager which you said you did you do need to go in gtm and add the new ga4 tags the good news is is if anyone has google analytics in google tag

has google analytics in google tag manager the old version then google tag manager makes it pretty easy to implement ga4 because you just go into google tag manager and you remap things into the ga4 structure uh jason asked about channel definitions if we can change that on the fly so hopefully once we get custom channels it'll work work the same there's a question on campaign manager 360. that integration isn't available yet so hopefully we'll see something on that later this year

later this year uh what level of access do you need to change over an account so you need edit change over an account so you need edit access access uh to be able to do that view viewers can see it and analysts can actually create things so if you want people to change property settings are conversion rates elevated i haven't seen conversion rates being elevated it's just channels and remember itp calls can caused conversion loss so

itp calls can caused conversion loss so a lot of the modeling features are restoring not necessarily inflating uh you're asking about user dimensions like logged and logged out does that get applied to all events so we do have users user scoped custom dimensions in ga4 those are going to be inside your custom definitions and if you want something that's user scoped you can see here i have one for isimo visiting my website and you just click create custom dimension you'll say you want that as

user scoped and then once you save that it's available for everything uh thank you can we combine if we have multiple can we combine if we have multiple websites websites yep you can have separate and combine yep you can have separate and combine them them do events configured and ga4 show up in bigquery they sure do why is it important that conversions populate wouldn't that be more helpful in google ads someone's asking about merchant center and why we want our conversions in

merchant center or you can also ask that question why would we want the ga4 conversions in google ads so conceptually there's two reasons one is it unifies things on a common conversion pipeline so the same conversions show up in all of your different platforms so you're not tracking them differently and secondly you can be more agile so previously with merchant center or google ads you actually had to deploy floodlights and all sorts of other google ads conversion pixels to measure all that with ga4 you can actually set up a lot

of this without necessarily needing to go back to your site and add new tags so it's not only more agile but also the types of conversions you can create are much more sophisticated donald you ask are there any big changes with ga4 and first party cookies no not with first party cookies first party cookies or cookies the bigger change is the google signals so you do have the cross device graph if you don't have a lot of logged in users so dana you asked about campaign manager will that no longer be a linking option

will that no longer be a linking option uh i'm pretty sure google is going to roll out a comp campaign manager integration that's just not available yet uh merchant center uh merchant center um um um [Music] [Music] [Music] limit limit limit july july yeah july 2023 is when it goes away can we see top conversion pass so we talked about that that was available inside advertising

and someone asked can i use page and sessions in ga4 so the answer to that is absolutely we can use page and sessions in ga4 can use page and sessions in ga4 so so if i go into my content reports i go into pages and screens it's not just pages and sessions um so i can create a custom report i actually created a tweet about that but you can also even use conversions so in universal analytics conversions was

something that never worked with pages and for the first time you can actually use your conversions deprecation a lot of people called me on that it's so it's 20 23 so sorry not that it's so it's 20 23 so sorry not 2022. 2022. uh someone asked what's the replacement for custom dimensions in ga4 uh there are custom dimensions in ga4 just like they are in universal so same thing in

all right with that i think we've pretty much covered everything so what we're going to do is we're going to follow up with the recording as i promised we're also going to follow up with some resources to help you all get started with ga4 and then we're going to have more kind of educational material if you don't have a ga4 property i think we'll do an upcoming webinar where we'll actually show you how to configure and set it up and get you some real experience so stay tuned for that but other than that you can find me on

but other than that you can find me on twitter or linkedin i talk about ga4 pretty much non-stop so thanks everyone for joining and i look forward to seeing you on the